I wrote about The Pentagon’s odd reporton Hasan last year — which treated the massacre as an issue of workplace violence. Reader Dennis Meredith of Sonoma took me to task. He wrote to me again this week to argue that the committee should have recognized the “profound differences between what I call ‘the real Army’ and its headshrinkers.”

Meredith also read the Senate report, and he thinks the committee missed the psychiatry angle. He tells me he served in the Army as a Lt. Col., Field Artillery, after 22 years on active duty. He served in Vietnam. He says he’s not anti-shrink, as “I believe their services are much needed in the current environment, and a lot of grief could have prevented if more along current lines had been done during Vietnam and earlier conflicts.”

But:

If there is such a culture of political correctness which fosters toleration of such blatantly unacceptable behavior as his before the massacre, I submit that it exists in the Medical Corps, who are mostly separate from the real military.

If Hasan had been an infantry officer, for example, his behavior would have been a red flag when brought to the attention of his commanders, and steps would certainly have been taken to revoke his security clearance and separate him from the service at the earliest possible moment.

Meredith and his wife visited Ft. Hood a couple of weeks before the massacre. “When Hasan did what he did, it really hit us hard. I will not dignify him by using a military rank, because in my mind he was never a military officer, despite the insignia he wore.”